


the golden boy

by superstarrgirl



Series: patchwork children [3]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Canon Compliant, M/M, Post-Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie), Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Revelations, also sam wilson is a national treasure, captain america as a hero fallen from grace, character cameos, long fic, marvel quotes, natasha and steve are the brotp to end all brotps, nothing explicit more like they're figuring it out, s'a lil jumpy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-27
Updated: 2017-07-27
Packaged: 2018-12-07 14:52:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,926
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11625876
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/superstarrgirl/pseuds/superstarrgirl
Summary: “I watched,” she murmurs. “When they dragged you from the ice, I watched on the television. And I couldn’t help but think, maybe if we had looked harder–.”“Don’t.” Steve interrupts, quiet and desperate. “Pegs, don’t.”She smiles at him, one side of her mouth tilted up wearily, quietly. She’s as beautiful as the day he met her, as beautiful as the night in the dress, as the day she kissed him, as the last time he saw her. “You were always so good at that.” She says, and at his questioning look she laughs gently and runs a calloused thumb across his jaw. “At shouldering other people’s guilt.”(Captain America from start to end, from icon to fall from grace)





	the golden boy

He remembers what it was like, after Bucky died – remembers the emptiness, the hollowed chest where his best friend once rested. He would have drunk his way through that bar and through the rest of that town if Peggy hadn’t stopped him, hadn’t put a hand on his and tugged him back from the edge. 

“I won’t stop until all of HYDRA is dead,” He tells her, swallowing around the lump in his throat. “I won’t stop until they’ve all suffered for what they did.”

70 years later and he wakes to find that nothing has changed.

Peggy is older now, weary and grey and tired, but she smiles like she was 23 years old, like they were back in that bar, her in the red dress and him in his dress greens and little more than a breath of air between them.

“I watched,” she murmurs. “When they dragged you from the ice, I watched on the television. And I couldn’t help but think, maybe if we had looked harder–.”

“Don’t.” Steve interrupts, quiet and desperate. “Pegs, _don’t_.”

She smiles at him, one side of her mouth tilted up wearily, quietly. She’s as beautiful as the day he met her, as beautiful as the night in the dress, as the day she kissed him, as the last time he saw her. “You were always so good at that.” She says, and at his questioning look she laughs gently and runs a calloused thumb across his jaw. “At shouldering other people’s guilt.”

 _She’s your forever girl, huh, Rogers_ , Bucky had teased, all those years ago. _She’s your Ginger Rodgers._

 _S’that make me Fred Astaire_ , Steve had quipped back, and Bucky whacked him over the head.

Fury shows him the helicarriers, the equipment and the guns and their capabilities, and he realizes that little has changed. You can’t trust people to the right thing, to fight the good fight. Not like this, when everyone is too scared of how it ends. _This isn’t freedom,_ he says, because he’s seen this story before. _This is fear_.

Camp Lehigh gets blown to pieces and, with it, SHIELD crumbles to dirt.

If he thinks about the truth too long, about who he’s really been working for, his hands start to shake – SHIELD had been Peggy’s greatest accomplishment, had been her pride and her love. She had started it for him, and someone had taken the one thing he had left of Margaret Anne Carter and had burned it to ash, right underneath him.

The Winter Soldier fights like Natasha does, fights with his body weight, with delicacy and determination. He swings his knife and his fists and his gun, keeps Steve on the defensive the whole time. The mask comes off in Steve’s hand, and his whole world comes crashing to the ground.

“Bucky?” He asks, and watches something flicker in the Soldier’s gaze, like a light has been dimmed, but it’s gone before Steve can snatch at it.

Natasha grips his hand; bullet wound bleeding bright in the dim of the car. “He’s not who he was,” She tells him tightly. “You gotta – you gotta know that, Steve. Gotta know that it’s not him.” And then she falls back against the siding of the car and Sam eyes the wound, snaps that it’s going to get infected if they don’t do something about it. When Maria Hill pulls off the helmet, Steve sort of wants to cry.

“Compartmentalization or _lying_?” Steve snaps, and Fury raises an eyebrow and seems to be mulling over how best to handle this.

“Wasn’t sure who I could trust.” He settles on, and Natasha shifts ever so slightly in her seat. Steve wonders, not for the first time, how it must feel to have all these people around you and to know that not a single one of them feels they can place their life in your hands. He imagines it must be horrifyingly lonely.

With a steady hand, he squeezes the back of Natasha’s neck, and she reaches up her good arm and grips his wrist for one brief, terrifying moment.

The old uniform is stiff, scratchy against his skin. It doesn’t fit the way the original one did, doesn’t fit the way the suit Tony created does. But it _will_ work, for now, at least. This isn’t about war – this is about what follows.

This is about bringing Bucky Barnes home after 75 years.

When they meet in the helicarrier, Bucky’s lost the mask. Maybe it was a conscious decision from his handlers, so that when Steve fought him, when their paths finally crossed, he’d be fighting Bucky and not the Soldier.

 _I fought by your side_ , Steve wants to shout. _I knew you better than anyone else in your whole goddamn life, James Buchanan Barnes, and I know what they’ve turned you into, I know I should have done better, I’m sorry I didn’t jump after you, I’m so sorry._

He’s dizzy and he’s bleeding and wounded, but he plants his feet and drops the shield and says, “I’m not gonna fight you.” The helicarrier shrieks around them, bowing under its own weight, and Steve can hear Maria’s voice in his mind, her quiet desperation, her hurried begging. He thinks of Bruce, of Tony, of Clint. He thinks of Natasha. He thinks of Bucky as he fell from that train in 1945. “You’re my friend.” Pain bursts behind his eyes as Bucky lunges and his head hits the railings of the helicarrier.

Bucky looks deranged, terrifying, shockingly wild. He shouts and he swings and his metal fist makes contact with Steve’s chin, splitting it. Pain shoots through his whole body, but Steve still manages to croak out, _I’m with you till the end of the line_.

The look on Bucky’s face before darkness pulls Steve under – it’s enough to make him believe in God all over again.

When he wakes up in hospital, wincing and groaning with pain but alive nonetheless, Natasha storms her way in and stands in the doorway like a hurricane, waiting. Sam’s eyebrow raises as he gives Steve a single, terrified look, and then he excuses himself and fucking _scampers_.

Natasha’s grey eyes are narrowed, bright in the fluorescent lights of the hospital. “Nat--.” Steve finally starts.

“If you ever pull dangerous shit like that,” she interrupts, and her voice is sharp and cold and flat but, just under, he can hear a tremor that he’ll never dare name. “I swear to every god in this fucked up world – I’ll kill you myself.” Her fists tighten against her legs, and she looks a heartbeat from breaking.

With a sigh, Steve struggles into a sitting position and says, as gently as he can, “I’m still here, Nat.” She jerks as though he’d reached out and slapped her. “I’m not going to leave, I promise.” When she says nothing in response, still stares at him with that cold look, he cracks a small smile. “’Sides, where’s the fun in life if you’re not willing to risk it by jumping off a falling helicarrier?”

She doesn’t laugh, but she does take up the chair Sam had been in and prop her feet up on the bed. They don’t talk much after, but it’s okay, Steve gets it.

Somewhere between New York and this quiet moment in a hospital in DC, Natasha Romanoff has become _family_ , and Steve can’t say that he minds.

When Tony calls them all in, Steve takes the train to New York. Counts the steps to Stark Tower and then up to the top floor. “I would’ve gotten you a car.” Tony calls from where he’s bent over schematics, Thor on one side and Banner on the other.

“You knew I was walking?” Steve shoots back, and Tony grins.

Months seem to fly by as they crawl through the rubble of SHIELD and of HYDRA. The few people who know about Bucky jabber, “Зимний солдат” until Steve breaks their jaw or their nose out of anger. Sometimes they find weapons – old HYDRA guns that should’ve been destroyed when Steve flew the plane into the ocean – or files upon files of old HYDRA bases and still-rampant thugs. Mostly, they find nothing.

Ultron stumbles into the living room of Stark Tower with glowing red eyes and a broken body. “I’ve got no strings anymore,” He grins, and Steve ducks as the suits burst through the wall.

After, after Tony’s cleared as much of the rubble away as he can, Steve hurls his shield through a window and watches it land, dejected, on the patio. He wants to tear this tower apart, wants to slam Tony’s head against a wall for being so goddamn careless. He wants to yell and shriek and break everything he can get his hands on. Instead, he rolls up his sleeves and gets to work.

 _God’s righteous man_ , Ultron says. _Pretending he could live without a war_. Something cold settles in Steve’s stomach, a sort of sharp pain that wraps tendrils around his ribcage and holds tight.

In his dream, the cymbals crash. Someone droops over a table, wine stain bleeding on his shirt and laughter etched on his face. A bass drum hits, and Steve ducks. Peggy extends her hand, Steve takes it, and they dance. She’s a warm, familiar weight in his arms, more beautiful than he could ever dare to remember. In between one moment and the next, she’s gone.

Steve’s alone.

Laura Barton is a shock; the children are a shock. The farmhouse is a shock. Behind him, something crackles, and Steve whips around to see Thor gingerly lifting a heavy foot from a crumpled Lego figure that looks like it’s dressed in red white and blue. The little girl calls Natasha _Auntie Nat_ and Barton kisses his wife on the nose and the cheek and the ear just to make her laugh and Steve – Steve _wants_. Wants so bad that his chest aches, because he knows he’s seeing something he can never have.

That night, he borrows Clint’s house phone to call Sam. “Any new leads?” He asks right as he hears Sam inhale, open his mouth.

“No,” Sam answers. “Dude’s a ghost – every time I think I’m gettin’ somewhere with him, it’s like he vanishes all over again. I’ve turned up every stone I can, but you know –,” he hesitates here, and Steve has to grip the counter with white-knuckled fingers so his legs don’t give out. “Sometimes people just don’t wanna be found.” 

Steve lets out a long, stuttering breath. “Yeah.” He says, and then: “Keep looking.”

“There are worse ways to go.” Natasha says on a city in the clouds, and Steve glances at her out of the corner of his eye and wonders how much he knows about her, truly. About where she comes from, who she wanted to be. He wants to say something – wants to apologize, wants to say thank you. Wants to ask who she was before the Red Room reached inside her head and pulled.

 _There are worse ways to go,_ Steve thinks, and watches Bucky fall from a train in Austria.

Every lead on the Winter Soldier they manage to get their hands on seems to fizzle out before it can really take them anywhere. Steve’s busy, tired, worn-out, exhausted from training the new recruits. Wanda screams at night, and Sam gets up every morning and runs until he can barely breathe, and Rhodey butters his toast with even strokes and flinches when the other recruits call too loudly outside his window.

  
Steve pours juice into glasses with hands that barely shake and trains until his knuckles are split and bleeding and looks for Bucky in every place he can think of.

He wants to go home, back to Brooklyn. Wants to go back to their tiny little apartment on the fourth floor with the spare key under a rock on the landing, and he wants to toss all the pillows and blankets onto the floor and build a nest and get graphite smudges on Bucky’s face when they get into wrestling matches that Bucky always let him win. He wants his life back, before he put on the suit and wove his way into history books. 

Anthony Stark marches his way onto the compound with the Sokovia Accords in one hand and the end of the Avengers in the other.

The argument has been going on for the better part of an hour, and Steve has been flipping through the Accords and listening as Rhodes and Sam bicker. He listens, idly, until Tony pulls up the face of a boy Steve doesn’t know, says that all he wanted to do was something _worthwhile_. Steve watches Tony, with his nice suit and his glowing heart and empty, scared eyes and thinks, _I know guys with none of that worth ten of you_.

My god, he thinks numbly. How far we’ve come from the beginning of it all.

When Natasha says, “If we’ve got one hand on the wheel we can still steer,” the world drops from under his feet. When his phone buzzes in his pocket – _she’s gone. in her sleep_. – any semblance of control he had on watching his family split down the middle slips out of his grasp and hits the floor. Shatters, cold and sharp and ricocheting.

“It is your job to plant yourself like a tree and say, _no, you move_.” Sharon Carter announces, eyes fixed on Steve, with a gaze so determined that it’s eerie how much she is Peggy’s niece.

They bury Peggy Carter as a woman who loved her family, who loved her job. They bury her as a hero. Steve stands over her plot of land, over the gravestone with her name on it, and remembers how it felt to be a soldier in love in the middle of a war.

He fought his way through a HYDRA base in 1944, carried a broken communication device in his pocket just to prove that he _couldn’t call his ride_. Peggy had laughed herself half to death, had run fingers over his split knuckles and tapped on the siding of his shield so it rang hollow in the morning light. “You are as stubborn as you are wonderful.” She had said, grinning, and Steve had fallen head over heels between one breath and the next.

His phone rings on the way back to the hotel – Natasha, telling him that she’s on the jet to Vienna, will let him know when she arrives, who else agrees to sign. “Don’t do anything stupid.” She warns, like he didn’t just bury the only person he’s ever loved. 

 _Don’t do anything stupid till I get back_.

“What, and risk them taking down my Smithsonian exhibit?” 

(They will, of course, when this is all over – when he’s a fugitive with blood on his hands and no shield at his back and no insignia emblazoned on the side of his uniform. His Smithsonian exhibit will be dismantled, thrown in a storage locker, as Captain America falls from grace.

 _History did not cooperate_ , the Austrian doctor said, disembodied voice echoing in the bunker. _And so history was changed_. Three years later and Steve wants to laugh until he cries because – because nothing has changed, not a _goddamn fucking_ _thing_.) 

“We have orders to shoot on sight.” Sharon Carter tells him, and Steve snatches up the file and gets the first train to Bucharest with Sam Wilson, war hero who deserves a quiet life, right on his heels.

The apartment is the top floor – small, dingy, dark. A mattress sits in one corner, a sleeping bag on top with two pillows resting on it. The little table by the window is uneven, one leg shorter than the rest. Dishes are drying by the sink and there’s a bowl of apples by the window and the bathroom is neat and organized in a way that feels homey, comfortable. Candy bars slide off the notebook when he grabs at it, and he flips through it cautiously, slowly.

The fragments of Bucky Barnes’ life are contained in the worn pages, and a photograph of Steve in the old uniform falls out into his open hand. 

The first thing he notices is the glove over Bucky’s arm, the sweatshirt and the pulled-low baseball cap. His hair is curling around his ears, scruff along his jaw that looks neatly trimmed and well taken care of. Years ago, a lifetime and a war away, he had pulled Steve out of an alley in his dress greens, hair slicked back neatly with a wide smile and clean-shaven face. He had looked every part the soldier he was terrified to be. 

“That’s not good enough,” Steve says, calm, and Bucky flinches. “You pulled me from the river, why?” Steve demands, and Bucky shrugs. “This doesn’t have to end in a fight.” Steve says, and Bucky breathes out, slow, and scrubs his right hand across his face.

“It always ends in a fight.” He sighs, and his metal hand catches the first bullet that flies. 

They had fought side-by-side all those years ago, when Steve had grown and Bucky had shrunk and there were chemicals running parallel through their veins. They had fought next to each other, had saved each other’s lives enough times to know how it went. But, even so, even here, even now, Bucky still tugs Steve behind the shield, still steps in front of the blast, still hurls him through the window to try and get him to back off of the fight.

Even so, even here, even now, seventy-five years and thousands of split moments between them, Bucky’s first thought is of protecting Steve.

Bucky doesn’t use the metal arm against one single human being, not once. 

They get apprehended in a tunnel, and King T’Challa pulls off his helmet and retracts his claws and Sam’s jaw ticks, just slightly, and Bucky’s metal hand clenches and Steve thinks, _I’ve started something I can’t hope to finish_. 

“I’m sorry Tony,” Steve says, honest. “But I can’t take the blame for your mistakes.” Tony recoils, shockingly hurt. His mouth opens once, twice, and then he turns and slams the Accords on the desk.

“All of this for one man?” He snarls, and when Steve says nothing: “Barnes ain’t no hero, Rogers.” 

 _Your father respected him!_ Steve almost shouts; almost throws the document through the glass surrounding the conference room. _Your father respected him and trusted him and he’s more hero than you’ll ever hope to be_. “He’s not,” is what he settles on instead. “But he’s trying to be.” 

Tony slams the door so hard the walls rattle.

Steve’s bleeding and he’s hurt and aching from being pushed down an elevator shaft, but he wraps a steady hand around the helicopter, holds tight even when his feet lift from the ground and his muscles start to strain. With one hand on the copter and another around the iron bar of the UN, he thinks of stories he used to hear – about mothers lifting cars or husbands tearing doors off hinges or scraping through walls to get to the people they love. He thinks that he would stop a freight train if it meant he could hold onto Bucky for a little while longer.

It’s the first time, hanging by a thread above Berlin, that he thinks of the lengths he’d go to for James Buchanan Barnes.

All those years ago, he suffered through dates and dancing and dames who wanted little to do with him all because Bucky tugged at his sleeve and smiled like the devil until Steve grounded out _fine I’ll go but they don’t want me all the dames in this goddamned city only want you_. He stormed a HYDRA base on the off chance that Bucky had somehow lived through whatever hell he had gone through. He raged and he fought and he swung fists that still felt too big for the little guy he was, and he held that steel shield with an iron grip even though one solid punch could snap the thing in half. 

At first he had said, “I don’t want to kill anyone,” and he hadn’t. But Bucky had fallen from a train in Austria with Steve’s name on his lips, and Steve had wanted to watch HYDRA burn.

It’s a startlingly sobering thought, to realize just how much he loves Bucky. 

“Your mom’s name was Sarah,” Bucky croaks out, eyes distant, like he’s picturing that little plot of land in Brooklyn that they could barely afford with a gravestone that read _Sarah Rogers, Mother Daughter Wife Lover_. “You used to wear newspapers in your shoes.” His voice sounds wet and human and so goddamn scared.

He’s still Steve’s Bucky, under everything that HYDRA did to him. He’s still the same boy that fell from the train.

“You do realize,” Sam says, eyes narrowed as they watch Bucky from the other room. “The dude tore the steering wheel _off my car_. While I was _driving it_.” Bucky’s falling asleep, head tipped back against the wall and arms resting in his lap. “I dunno about you and your absurdly strong determination to forgive and forget, but that’s not something I’m willing to let go as easy.”

“You can walk away,” Steve says, quiet, with little more in his voice that sad resignation. Sam can walk away – Sam _might_ walk away, he’s earned that right more than anyone else, and Steve won’t begrudge him that. But Sam just scoffs and rolls his eyes and mutters, “should’ve walked away when some asshole in a t-shirt that didn’t fit kept running past me talkin’ about _on your left_ , that’s when I should’ve goddamn walked away.” And Steve laughs so hard that he thinks he might cry.

They stay in that warehouse for one night, and Steve falls asleep curled in a corner while Sam sleeps outside the door. If Bucky were to wake up, were to switch back to the Soldier, the person who can meet him swing for swing, who has always been able to match him, is Captain America.

For the first time in nearly seventy-five years, Steve Rogers dreams.

He dreams of their little apartment and of Bucky in his dress greens, getting his orders. Dreams of Peggy in that dress, the lines around Bucky’s mouth from laughter and his eyes warm and bright from the alcohol. In his dreams, he sees the Winter Soldier with a gun pointed at a Howard Stark that Steve never knew. In his dreams he sees himself as he falls from the helicarrier, as the shield falls from his grip and a cold metal hand reaches out through the murky water and pulls him to the surface. He dreams of a Bucky Barnes that loved him before he was Captain America, and a Bucky Barnes that loved him after, loved him enough to pull him from the water and breathe life into his lungs and leave him there on the bank of the Potomac.

He wakes up to see a real Bucky, half-asleep and barely breathing, one hand curled into the space between them as if he had reached out to touch but thought better of it.

“Steve,” Natasha murmurs, quiet and desperate. “Do you really think you can punch your way out of this one?” He can’t quite place the tremor in his voice, until he remembers her in his hospital room in DC, angry in a way that bordered frightening. That same little shiver, he knows what it is now – fear.

 _We have what we have when we have it_.

The kid in the suit fights well, but he really is just a kid, and Steve has a job to do, but he’s not a fucking _monster_. He knows he’s probably got a family waiting for him; he shouldn’t have to wade into a fight he’s got no business being in. It makes Steve angry, more so than anything else – Tony Stark, for all his snarling, has brought a child into a war. Has picked a kid to fight his battles.

“Like your father through and through, huh?” Steve spits before he can bite it back, and he has just enough time to watch understanding flicker across Tony’s face before T’Challa lunges for Bucky.

Mere steps from the quinjet, and Natasha steps out in front of them. “You’re not gonna stop, are you?” She questions, one hand already rising, and Steve – Steve can’t do it. He can’t fight her. She may have chosen Tony, but they’re family through and through. She’s _Natasha_ , and Steve can’t hurt her. 

When the shock current hits T’Challa in the chest and his legs give out, a love so strong swells in Steve’s chest that it nearly knocks him sideways.

Bucky tenses when he sees the old bunker in Siberia, but he grips his rifle and watches Steve’s six and for one strange, terrifying moment, Steve thinks he’s back in Austria on that train. It feels like the world is holding its breath, waiting for something to go wrong.

When Tony steps out of the elevator, something that tastes hopeful flares up in Steve’s stomach, threatening to crawl its way up into his mouth. Bucky’s defensive, but Tony flips up his face shield and puts his hands up, and Steve’s seen enough of that look to know what this is, to know that this is repentance and forgiveness and apology.

“You may have – been right.” Tony says haltingly. “About the psychiatrist.” He nods at Bucky, who’s lowered the gun but is still on edge, still ready to fire. “I’m sorry. For not listening to you.” He raises his hands and smiles and for twenty glorious minutes, the world shifts back onto its axis.

It feels for a moment like the air goes still when the Soldier shoots out the video camera. Steve glances at Bucky before he can stop himself, sees the twisted and agonized look on his face. Had he recognized them? Had he recognized _Howard?_ Had there been anything left of Bucky Barnes in his chest, in his brain, in his heart?

 _Sargent Barnes?_ Howard had gasped, and there had been no stilting recognition then, no moments where the Soldier fell away and Bucky gasped through the agony.

Tony lunges for Bucky, throws Steve back with one perfectly aimed hit. Super-soldier strength only takes him so far, and though he manages to destroy one of Tony’s boots, it still leaves Tony with enough energy to slam the roof on the place. Steve’s too far away to do any good, but he hears Tony demand, “do you even _remember_ them?”

Bucky gasps, metal fingers clawing at metal, “I remember all of them.”

On even ground, Tony’s suit failing, Bucky dives in front of a blast that would have knocked Steve into the wall, and the noise he lets out is something so cold and painful that it tugs at Steve’s gut as all three of them realize – the metal arm has detached itself, and Bucky’s lying on the cold pavement, gasping for breath and tears spilling down his cheeks as agony splices through him.

Steve sees red. 

It’s a fury unlike anything he thinks he’s ever felt – an anger that starts in his stomach and claws its way up and out his throat in half-shrieks, snarls and jabs as he pulls the suit apart piece-by-piece, scrapes off the mask and swings until his fists are split open and Tony’s nose is askew and he’s not sure whose blood is whose. He sees Tony raise his hands, accept defeat, but he doesn’t care – _he’s my friend so was I he’s my friend so was I_ – doesn’t care about anything except the anger that’s spilling out of his fists, a rage that’s been building for nearly a century.

When he raises the shield, fear flashes across Tony’s face, pure and tangible. When Steve brings it down on the arc reactor, the world goes quiet.

“That shield doesn’t belong to you!” Tony yells, and it hits the floor with a startling sense of finality. Here, in a bunker in Siberia, Captain America dies. Here, in a bunker in Siberia, a hero falls from grace as the man behind steps up to bat.

_We have what we have when we have it._

Natasha marches back into his life a month later, muscles her way through Wakandan guards and a wary king and punches Steve clean in the mouth. “Idiot.” She mutters, yanking him into a hug even as the Dora Milaje crowd around their king, eye this newcomer warily. Steve buries his face into her shoulder, breathes in the smell of her skin and the curl to her hair and, _finally_ , lets the tears push out of his throat.

Steve fights, tooth and nail, against it. Provides reason upon reason, fights and howls and breaks things until Sam says quietly, “you gotta give him this choice, Steve. Every other one’s been taken from him.”

James Buchanan Barnes slips into the ice in a lab in Wakanda, breath frozen in his lungs. Steve watches and thinks desperately, what I wouldn’t give to have fallen into that ravine with you in Austria. 

Steve watches and thinks, what I wouldn’t give to wear that uniform and carry that shield with you by my side.

Steve watches and thinks, how sad to see the two soldiers we’re playing, boys pretending they could live without a war _._

( _Everything special about you came out of a bottle)_

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> this reaaaaaaaally is a little jumpy and I am sorry about that but I had so much fun writing it!!! I hope you guys enjoy it! it's also waaaaaay longer than the other two in the series but i kinda got carried away. 
> 
> p.s. can we also talk about the new infinity war poster bc lemme tell you i near about lost my mind seeing captain rogers with a beard let me tell y'all
> 
> p.p.s i would also like to make it clear that i in no way mean to offend anyone with my portrayal of tony, or if steve seemed like a jerk in spots especially in regards to tony, but i think they're both so deep into believing that they're both right that they're really willing to say whatever they want and not care. I also have a lot of feelings about tony's stance on the accords and so steve's little quip about not taking tony's guilt i feel is a little childish and a little harsh but is also true, to some degree. take with that what you will :)


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